Slashdot Mirror
The Guardian On Intellectual Property
mykdavies writes "The Guardian has an excellent article giving lay readers an overview of some of the problems being caused by the concept of 'intellectual property', including references to stories familiar to Slashdot readers, such as DVD Jon, the Sony rootkit, Amazon and Google business patents." From the article: "Even facts about the world can, in some cases, become the property of commercial companies. It was the promise of gaining patents on the human genome that lured investors into the private consortium that attempted to sequence it in competition with the public effort. Laboratory animals have already been patented, starting with the OncoMouse, an animal whose genome has been manipulated to ensure that it develops cancer."
Intellectual property stuff is purely evil. Don't quote me on this or I'll sue.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Something is very wrong with the patent system when living creatures can ba patented.
I for one welcome our new cancerous, patented rodent overlords.
Explain to them that someone else is trying to patent God's work (and/or derivatives of), and set them loose.
I read the article shortly before it appeared on /., and was irritated to find that it makes no mention of the FSF or Richard Stallman at all, despite making the point that software patents are bad and are stifling creativity. How to take action against such a great threat must surely be an important part of any critical article, yet the author makes no effort to do any such thing.
Other than that, though, it was a good read, covering more than just software patents, and is a good attention-raiser for this important topic. Maybe the mainstream media will finally wake up to the very real threat IP poses...
HAH! I just wasted a second of your life making you read this, but I wasted a minute of mine thinking it up. DAMN.
Would you rather we all just keep quiet over the Sony/rootkit story, do as we're told, keep buying our DRMed/etc. CDs, and act like good, unquestioning consumers? Sorry, but I think that this is something we simply do have to keep on about. We have to make sure people know that Sony are not beneath putting this sort of software on their CDs (even if they didn't know quite everything the rootkit did, they're still responsible for putting it on their products), else we'll only see things getting worse.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
This makes it likely for other those so inclined to understand our point. They even note the paradoxical effect that manditory enforcement of copyright would have on Microsoft and other monopolist companies relying on licensed products.
However, I notice that there is very little variety in the links at the end of the document. Maybe they should point to a few different places---the FFII website might be a good start, as they seem to come out as being friendly to (small- and medium-sized) business IMO, and they're European.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again ... if western society thinks it can stop other countries from using existing ideas to build new ideas, we're crazy.
China, as an example, has shown a complete lack of respect for the copyrights on software, and I see nothing to convince me that they are going to pay any attention to north american IP laws when push-comes-to-shove...
At some point the 'powers' are going to have to realise that ideas are not the same as physical property, and can not be treated the same.
All new knowedge is built on the work of those that came before. The rate of increase of new ideas is directly related to how quickly the new idea can be passed on to. So why is it that now when the dissemination of information is essentially instantaneous and free we are working hard at creating artificial barriers to impede progress?
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
I just know the US will weaken its IP laws somewhere in the near future. The US has developed a nice system for correcting draconian laws, it goes something like this:
Government: Look here, we have some nice (new) laws to make you feel better.
People: *yawn* Who gives a fuck?!?
Government: Ok then, lets up the ante...
Small group: Hey, that's not right.
People: *yawn* Who gives a fuck?!?
Government: The "small group" didn't elect me *rinses* *repeats*
Small group: Ok, now I'm mad, I'm calling shenanigans...
People: *yawn* Who gives a fuck?!?
Government: Just one more tweak, then we can retire...
People: Huh what's happening?.... Get out the guns, it's time for a revolution
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Excellent read. The first article I've read that actually covers the investor-patent relation as a trade market independent of the 'inventor'.
It also makes a clear distinction between the right to copy and concepts of ownership without overt use of analogy and metaphor.
The final point, that Intellectual Property is itself an idea that can be manipulated, distributed and copied, also offers fresh perspectives on what is often accepted as an ancient and unnegotiable moral framework; one in fact enforced by laws that are invented to make allow for the idea of IP in the first instance.
The purpose of copyrights and patents is to promote the progress of science and useful arts USC Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. It's purpose is not to make inventors rich.
When you look at the great inventions, people mostly didn't do it for the money. I talking not about things like the light bulb but the fundamental research that went into most of the break through discoveries in science. Take just about anything, the vacuum tube, the transistor, integrated ciruit, the Internet, etc. and you'll find the incentive came, not from being able to get rich from it, but by the desire to create and discover. That people can make a living from their discoveries and inventions is great but it's not essential for progress.
Hence we need a system for dealing with those conflicts, by deciding who gets to sit in the chair or eat the bread. And the system we use is the property system. We assign control over such things to individual people, and call those items "their property".
With ideas, the sort of things which are covered by patents and copyright, these conflicts do not exist. When you have an idea, everyone can make use of it without limiting its functionality. Hence there is no such problem to solve. No reason for such notions of property to exist. The notion of "intellectual property" is therefore an absurdity.
The purpose of copyrights and patents is completely different to the purpose of property. Deliberately implying otherwise is deception.
And if anyone needs to make use of deception when putting their case forward, it's a good sign that their case isn't strong enough to stand on its own merits.
(Also, copyrights and patents are a really stupid way of trying to get people to create ideas. Giving up your freedom is very seldom a good plan, and the limitations on freedom imposed by copyrights and patents have two obvious effects; they create more power, which by its nature centralises and then corrupts those who hold too much of it, thereby creating entities which hinder the growth of the very thing which we're supposed to be encouraging, and they cripple the end result, meaning for example that your new drugs are only of limited use, because only the relatively wealthy can use them. I can't immediately think of a field in which we wouldn't be better off in the final analysis if we used other non-freedom-removing means of paying the people who we need to pay to keep things moving, and in many fields we'd be better off with no such system at all over the current system.)
There seems to be this attitude that the suffering of slaves prior to 1850 was something that only happened back then. That it has nothing to do with now, that we are more civilized, more modern, more mature, and more sophisticated. With it comes the arrogance that what happened then, means nothing now, that what happened there has no value here, that the great torment and suffering back then can safely be ignored now as we blow off history and all the values that go with it in terms of understanding, freedom, markets, property, technology, and the coming replication age.
Surely anyone who claimed that there is no "incentive" go grow cotton without slaves on the plantation would be considered a barbaric. But if someone claims that there is no "incentive" to create intellectual and knowledge works without patents, then society calls them enlightened. If someone had said that the great wealth of America rested on slavery as a property right and the plantation system, they were a foolish idiot. But if someone says that the great wealth of societies in the coming replication ate rests on "Intellectual Property", then they are called wise. Anyone who says that slavery was about property rights and not control, is a liar. However, if they say that patents are not about control, but "Intellectual Property" then they are considered trustworthy. How about - if you don't like slavery - don't own slaves, and if you don't like patents no one forces you to buy those creations. How about - if you don't believe in slavery, you must be an anarchist, if you don't believe in patents you must be some kind of a communist. How about - you are a thief if you free slaves from the plantation, you are a thief when you copy "Intellectual Property".
So why are we spoon-feed these poor logical explanations over and over again? Because, like the assassin who befriends and mis-places his victims heart medications, rather than pull out a rifle and pop a bullet in the head. Like the rapist who drugs his victim, rather than attack her overtly and violently where all the scars, blood, and bruises can be detected. Patents are the pinnacle of quiet violence, they seem so innocent, they seem so sincere, and it is so hard to see any direct evil. After all, what could be less harmless then providing an incentive to inventors, right? But do they really promote invention - or just lock out and tie up inventions and discoveries that were likely to happen anyhow? Do they really help inventors, or do they hinder collaboration and sharing in a way that would put a police state to shame?
Perhaps the old lady has none to blame when her patented medication is too expensive to afford anymore. Who can the workers blame when the patented technology they bet their career on becomes useless as society migrates to less controlling technologies. Who can a child in Africa blame when they are dying of AIDS, and there are no generics to treat it! Who do we blame when researchers seeking a cure for cancer encounter massive obstacles to sharing individual research for fear that their peers will get one up on them, get a key patent, and lock them out! What do you do when a company buys up a patent on a safety device, but then decides not to use it nor let their competitors use it, other than watch people die who might not have otherwise. And all to often people just assume that every manufacturer having incompatible parts and appliances with every other manufacturer is a natural part of a free market, but is it? And does that really help our environment?
As people die because patents are either too costly and alternatives too sparse, and the needy go without, not because of genuine shortage, but because artificial human made restrictions. We must ask what will our role be in the pages of history as society enters into the replication age? Will it be like the lost souls who thought that the slave states could peacefully get along with the free states who today think that patents can peacefully co-exist with freedoms. Or will we be like the plantat
But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
I have not pirated any music over the internet...ever. Yet I stopped buying CDs:
1. I found out some are disabled for my digital devices.
(I buy music for simple enjoyment, for FUD, hassle & frustration)
2. I discovered new artists at the free legal download sites.
3. I discovered commercial-free, announcer-free internet radio, like SomaFM.
I might resume buying CD's when music companies can gurantee they'll work and will accept liability for selling me crap. On the other hand, I must give credit to their mis-treatment's role in expanding my digital music horizons beyond the limited world of CDs.
I would much rather see them make the point in a clear, concise and conspicuous fashion than have an article resembling an Oscar speech. It's rather ironic that you are asking them to acknowledge Stallman's ownership of the ideas they are presenting. Most people don't understand that this is a problem yet; let the fact that they have a problem sink in before evangelizing the solution.
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)
:)
(aka "the Betamax case")
Essentially, the court found that home time-shifting is a fair use, which is not exactly the same as making "backups", it is extremely similar.
More on point might be American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1994). In that case, the court found that making unauthorized copies of journal articles was copyright infringement. The copying there was much more similar to P2P, where there was a library with a single (or a few) copies of the journals, and researchers from texaco were making hundreds of copies so that they could each have their own at their work areas. But the court did state that if the purpose of the copying had primarily been so that a researcher could take the photocopy into the lab and not accidentally damage the original, it probably would have been fair use.
Section 107 of the Copyright Act outlines some specific instances of fair use (criticism, comment, news reporting, etc.), but does not limit fair use to only those purposes, instead codifying the judicial doctrine of fair use (the 4-part test somebody noted above).
Usual disclaimer applies: IANAL, just a well-meaning law student studying hard for his Copyright final.
fuck you.
I must say, this is one of the worst articles on IP I've ever seen. Whoever thinks it's 'excellent' is just hankering for some anti-establishment echo-room action rather than reality. I don't think I have time to cover them all, but here are just a few.
This is baloney. It's been quite a while since the constitution was written, and right there in Article 1 section 8 clause 8 is the statement by the framers that is the basis for our patent system. Ideas could be owned in 1789, and long before that as well, as England also had a patent system.
Not to mention the fact that money is an idea, equitable servitudes are ideas, usufructs are ideas, loans are ideas, contracts are ideas, and, now this will really blow your mind --
options on options...
well, you get the idea.
Facts about the world, laws of nature, or abstract mathematical statements or equations, cannot be patented.
Gene sequences may seem to be getting close to that line, but you can only patent a gene sequence that you can extract and replicate; it's analogous to extracting and purifying a chemical compound from a naturally occurring mixture of substances, in effect making available a new substance that no one could put to practical use before.
An animal that's human-engineered is certainly not a 'fact of nature' -- it never existed before someone made it. It's a result of engineering just as much as an electric circuit or a toaster. It's just alive.
This is one of those completely unsubstantiated statements. I tend to think that many of the drugs that the developing world uses were developed at least partially due to the patent system. At any rate, what's really clear is that they ALL come from the U.S. and Europe.
I would just like to point out that both sides have lawyers -- this makes it sound like lawyers are the enemy. In fact, lawyers are just the guys that help their clients get what they deserve under the law.
People with more money have always been able to hire better lawyers in our legal system, and that problem has nothing to do with intellectual property.
The system is supposed to work this way. It incentivizes companies to research and patent things as fast as they can, pushing the limits of technology, and then disclosing them to the public. Otherwise, they might do less research, and might keep their research secret, thereby keeping it from the rest of us much longer than the 20 year life of patents... Sometimes reverse engineering is possible, but sometimes it's not.
How about so I can pay my programmers? How about so I can invest i
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine. (emphasis my own)
What's funny is this has worked so well in our War on Drugs that our prisons everywhere are bursting at the seams! What portion of society do you exclude before the rules have to change?
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
There have indeed been cases of farmers being sued by Monsanto because their crops were contaminated bij pollen from nearby Monsanto crops. The most famous case is Monsanto vs Schmeiser.